Street Meeting, San Francisco / "Here Democracy Survives" / "What's Ahead?"

1934

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Dimensions

24.4 × 18.4 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-710071

> After returning from a seven-month sojourn in New Mexico, Dorothea Lange observed from her studio the increasing number of unemployed workers in the streets of San Francisco. She took her camera outdoors and began to make pictures of groups of men at soup kitchens, May Day demonstrations, and strike rallies. The photographer Willard Van Dyke recognized the quality of this output and arranged a show of the images at his studio gallery. He also wrote a critique of Lange's work of the October 1834 issue of *Camera Craft* that was illustrated with five of her photographs, including a substantially cropped version of *White Angel Breadline* ([2000.43.1](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/137660)) and *General Strike/Street Meeting, San Francisco* ([2001.86](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/144516))*.* He explained Lange's motivation for tracking the "drama of human relations": "In an old Ford she drives to a place most likely to yield subjects consistent with her general sympathies. Unlike the newspaper reporter, she has no news or editorial policies to direct her movements; it is only her deeply personal sympathies for the unfortunate, the downtrodden, the misfit…